The World Won't Listen

Welcome, year-long quarantined reader, as I introduce you to the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Yes, last weekend we romped merrily out of the house, and jumped in the car in expectation of whisking Helen to her book sale down in the luxurious confines of the Cubberley Community Centre. Except when I turned the ignition key, all the lights went out and nothing happened.

Fortunately this wasn't a kind of seizure on my part, but unfortunately it did indicate that the car had a flat battery and wasn't going to be able to transport our heroine to her urgent bookselling duties. Luckily, Lyft and Uber are more-or-less the fourth emergency service round here, so Helen was able to quickly pick up a cab and make it there essentially on time (COVID precautions in the cab, including seemingly hastily-stapled bin liners to separate driver from passenger, were very much in evidence).

It seems the big advantage of leasing a car is that you don't have to worry about this kind of stuff; you can just phone someone, and they turn out fairly quickly to give you a jump start. With us now a year deep into Everything That's Happened, the car has done very little mileage - 5000 miles in the 18 months we've owned it - and having done a succession of short trips, it's perhaps not surprising that the battery went flat. Still, I now know how to get roadside assistance when I need it, which can't be bad.

We appear to be reaching an optimistic phase of the pandemic, which is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put. Here in Santa Clara County, our data's looking pretty good, and as a result we've now moved to the less restrictive 'red tier'. That means it's OK to do indoor dining at restaurants, but as we should all learn at a young age, people, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. In my humble opinion, we're still at a stage where the virus is essentially endemic in the community, and a very limited number of people are immune through either exposure or vaccination. As such it's inevitable that any reopening is going to drive the data the other way; given that our healthcare workers have had a year of working in the most stressful conditions imaginable, that's going to lead to restrictions being re-imposed. I don't intend to relax my level of caution, and I don't suggest you do either.

Anyway, the big news in Palo Alto is another C - Castilleja School:

Again, this is a fascinating microcosm of the differences between the US and the UK. Castilleja is a private girls school and it costs $52,000 a year to send your beloved daughter there. In the UK, this would be seen as an elitist institution, and viewed with significant suspicion and perhaps even enmity from the local community. Here, no-one's batting an eyelid over the fact that it's a private school for privileged kids (it is, after all, situated in the second most expensive zip code in the US, and I suspect there are many locals that would love their children to go to Castilleja that just can't today because it's full); local objections stem from the potential for increases in traffic, and Castilleja's apparent forgetfulness over its legal commitments in the past (it was asked to cap admissions numbers by the City of Palo Alto, primarily to keep traffic impact down, but somehow 'forgot' and admitted an extra 33 students).

Hilariously, the planning application being debated here appears to hinge on whether the underground parking structure which Castilleja proposes to build is classified as a garage or a basement. If it's a basement, then it's OK; if it's a garage, well, garages are only allowed on residential properties, so it's not OK. Whether the extension is actually a good idea or not seems somewhat academic at this point - garage or basement, folks, you decide!

As I alluded to above, this week marks the one year anniversary of the work-from-home phase starting, and I believe next week, I'll have worked from home for a longer period of time than any other desk I've sat at since working for Google. At this point, it's starting to feel permanent, and I probably wouldn't mind that, although I'd quite like to get back into the office at least part-time. Anyway, got to go and give the car a one-hour thrash up in the hills to keep that battery topped up!